Stuff

For the run up to the election Opinium have moved from fortnightly to weekly polls for the Observer, and tonight’s figures are CON 32%(nc), LAB 34%(+1), LDEM 7%(+2), UKIP 15%(-3), GRN 8%(+2).

A couple of other updates. First, I have updated how the Uniform Swing Projection over on the sidebar is calculated. Up until now it has been a straight Uniform Swing across the whole of Great Britain. This was deliberately crude, a simple and uncontroversial uniform swing for reference, despite its know limitations. With the surge in SNP support through it had really become quite absurd – Scotland has often shown a different swing to the rest of Great Britain, but this is something in a new league. Hence from today I’ve switching to showing a figure based on a combination of a uniform swing across Scotland and a uniform swing across the rest of Great Britain. The Scottish UNS is based on an average of Scottish polls, the rest of GB UNS is based on an average of GB polls, adjusted to account for the absence of Scotland.

Second, I posted earlier in the week about the contrasting Survation/Unite and Ashcroft polls in Sheffield Hallam. One of the things I mentioned was that there was actually a slight error in the Ashcroft poll that had shown the Liberal Democrats ahead. Lord Ashcroft has now corrected the error (which was also repeated in his Thanet South and Doncaster North polls) and put up corrected tables on his website here. On the revised figures Lord Ashcroft’s Sheffield poll would also have shown Labour ahead of the Liberal Democrats, though by only 3 points. In Thanet South he would have shown a one point Tory lead, rather than the five points reported at the time. Ed Miliband would have been as safe as houses in Doncaster North with a thirty percent lead.

Lord Ashcroft doesn’t officially confirm who carries out the polls he commissions, but the reality is that most of his constituency polls are carried out by Populus – not that there are many companies who do constituency polling anyway (it can only be done on the telephone, and Ipsos MORI don’t do it, so that leaves very few options). In this case Populus did NOT carry out the poll, so the errors here shouldn’t be taken as a reflect on Populus or on Ashcroft’s other polls. In Lord Ashcroft’s own commentary he writes “I have not been in the habit of naming the polling companies I use, all of which are members of the British Polling Council, and I will not be naming this one. But I cannot allow this episode to cast doubt on the reliability of my polling more generally. So I must disclose that these three surveys last November are the first and only I have commissioned from a well-known but relatively new polling firm. And no, I won’t be using them again”.

The only other poll I know of in Sunday’s papers is the regular YouGov/Sunday Times polls.

UPDATE: Opinium have also made some changes to their methodology, detailled on their website here. There is a minor change to their age bands in their weighting to make sure they have enough under 25s, but the main change is to switch over to political weighting. Up until now Opinium and Ipsos MORI have been the only companies not to use some form of political weighting in their GB polls, Opinium are now introducing weighting by “Party propensity”, which seems to be similar in principle to the party ID weighting used by Populus and YouGov. Opinium’s weighting targets are based upon a rolling average of their recent polls and the European election result, which in practice means it should make figures less volatile and, according to Opinium, decrease their reported level of UKIP support.

Interestingly YouGov, Populus, ComRes and Lord Ashcroft have all made methodology changes in the last few months to get onto an election footing, and all started prompting for UKIP. Opinium are bucking the trend and look as if they are keeping UKIP in a second question for people who pick “other”.

The two Goulds – Philip and Bryan – are difficult to confuse apart from their moniker.

The recent history of the Labour Party would have been radically different if Bryan Gould had become leader, whereas Philip Gould was a prime architect of New Labour and its reliance on focus group findings.

Bryan Gould’s vision for the LP was to have mounted vigorous opposition to the notion of TINA. Instead New Labour became reactive, offering policies that were perceived to coincide with public opinion rather than attempting to debate or lead opinion.

I’ve never seen so much changing of weighting and methodology in the polls before. It’s scandalous, and shows that something’s not quite right and they keep changing the methods until they get the result they want.

“Many cabinet ministers don’t think the polls will change at all until the last few weeks of the campaign. One says: “We could end up in the same situation as 1992, where Labour were ahead right up to polling day.” Those working on the Labour campaign agree, with one telling me he doesn’t expect to believe the exit polls, let alone the numbers on the day. But I understand that Lynton Crosby has been holding briefings with MPs in which he predicts that the Tories will start to move ahead of Labour either this month or in March. Some say they have seen a graph by the Tory strategist that he claims backs up this prediction.

Crosby has also been running private polls in marginal seats since the start of the year that apparently suggest the Conservatives will do better than previous surveys have suggested. Indeed, many MPs in those seats are finding a better reception on the doorstep than they’d expected and some who were looking for jobs outside parliament now think they have a chance of holding on after all”

Of course Ashcroft was quite scathing about the Tory private polls in the past in his ‘wake up and smell the coffee’ report a few years ago.

re: the debate about whether to be on the right side of business leaders or to punch back.

I wonder if Labour figures have been looking at the Scottish referendum. It’s possible that they have drawn the conclusion that the aggressive approach that Yes (and, to a much greater extent, its supporters) took towards business figures that were opposed did it less harm than not taking that approach.

Yes was accused by its opponents of “intimidating” business opposition, but it would potentially have done it more harm if criticism had gone unchallenged: 1. not rebutting a criticism implies that it is valid; 2. it makes others think they are free to come forward and repeat that criticism.

Regarding my dispute over the word “wealth”, no doubt someone is going to come back and quote the title of the book the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith.

However, the word wealth does not have a precise meaning. Another famous textbook book on economics was called the Social Framework ( by Sir John Hicks). It is also another expression which is not precise.

If you talk about National Income that has a precise meaning. How accurately you can measure it is another matter.

Either they know some secrets to psephology that You Gov et la doesn’t, or the private polls are BS. In my view these polls are about as reliable as taking the word of partisan canvassers about what they are finding on the door steps.

The National Income is based on the flawed assumption that total production can be dissolved to incomes. It can’t, so it is not the an exact measure, and it’s not a measurement problem (Keynes knows it, but then he says that we need something so he sticks to it – but chooses arbitrarily between two of his contradictory definitions).

STATGEEK……..As with CROSSBAT11’s assertion that we can read body language, we can also read trends, it’s our interpretation of what we read that makes life interesting, we don’t have to agree with each other.
I don’t agree with any of the Leftwing posters on here, they don’t agree with me, but we are reading the same stuff, we’ll only know for sure in May. Your graph shows a definite recent upsurge, or perhaps I should have gone to Specsavers ? :-)

The best story recently was the change in “dialect” of the Dutch Chimps sent to Edinburgh Zoo.

“In 2010, nine new arrivals from a Dutch safari park used an excited, high-pitched call for apples – while the locals used a disinterested grunt.
By 2013, the Dutch chimps had switched to a similar low grunt, despite an undiminished passion for apples.”

I wonder anyone takes “CROSBY” polls seriously. Not only does he share a surname with a very popular crooner from the 40’s, 50’s and even early 60’s, but his film partner was a guy called No Hope.
I hope (pun intended) that this evidence will make the gullible realise, he is No Bloody Good. On top of all this, he is working for the Tories.
Say no more!!!

@COLIN
It has been my experience, in the pensions business and the British army, that Dutch people speak infinitely better English than 90% of Scots. (The people around Inverness excluded.) Of course the central belt are the worst culprits. The Scots would almost certainly say, “this proves the English are more closely related to chimpanzee’s than Scots are”. They have become so uncouth since that Salmond fellow came on the scene.

@Roland
“I wonder anyone takes “CROSBY” polls seriously. Not only does he share a surname with a very popular crooner from the 40’s, 50’s and even early 60’s, but his film partner was a guy called No Hope.
I hope (pun intended) that this evidence will make the gullible realise, he is No Bloody Good. On top of all this, he is working for the Tories.
Say no more!!!”

Crosby’s strength is undermining the opposition rather than strengthening his own side. I presume he is exercising these skills to seek to prove that EM and Labour are hopeless and have no chance of winning. Whether it will work we don’t yet know.

@Ann
Yes but, Isabel is very very pretty and that does make a difference.
As a Specky reader I must report that many Kippers on their site, think she is a liberal hussey. Of course, I defend her consistently.